For months if not years now, it’s been unclear how exactly new DCU head James Gunn was planning to merge his beloved Peacemaker into the new universe, ported over from the old DCEU in which the character, and his supporting cast, were born. Now we have our answer, and it’s genuinely hilarious.
He just…did it. In the Peacemaker season 2 premiere, he retconned season 1, and he quite literally erased the guest appearance of the Snyder-era Justice League from the finale of the last season.
Previously, after the chaotic events of the finale, the Justice League shows up, mostly in shadow, as he yells at them for taking their sweet time. We got an actual cameo from Ezra Miller’s Flash and Jason Momoa’s Aquaman for a few quips, others like Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman are only seen in silhouette.
Now Gunn simply erased that. Instead, he replaced the old JLA in that scene with Justice Gang members Hawkgirl, Mr. Terrific and Guy Gardner, along with Superman and Supergirl (who he says are not part of the Justice Gang, this was just a “team up”). Here, the non-shadow cameo is from Isabela Merced’s Hawkgirl and Nathan Fillion’s Guy, though they had a large role earlier in the episode.
You really just don’t see this kind of thing happening in this age of hyper-connected comic book universes, which often bend over backward to try and explain how everything is linked and painstakingly attempting to not break canon or retcon things.
Gunn didn’t bother trying and, A) it solves the problem instantly, Peacemaker and all those guys are now DCU, and the idea is that they more or less always have been, and B) the main group who will be super mad about Zack Snyder’s DCEU heroes being deleted are…huge Zack Snyder fans who already hate James Gunn with a fiery passion (see Superman’s screaming computer monkeys). So why bother caring what they think?
This does raise at least a few questions. If Peacemaker has always been DCU, how far back does this extend into the events of Gunn’s Suicide Squad movie? We know it’s canon that Peacemaker did in fact kill Rick Flagg Jr., but the status of Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn is nebulous, and Gunn won’t commit yet. He’s talked about bringing back Idris Elba’s Bloodsport. But one thing we know for sure is that despite the link to Harley, neither Jared Leto’s Joker or Ben Affleck’s Batman will be back. Gunn made a point this past episode to bash Jared Leto specifically by making fun of his band, part of a history of him not exactly loving the actor.
I love all this. It’s just hilarious to do it this way. All the speculation about alternate dimensions and cloning characters to make a DCU copy of them were just rewritten with one retcon scene. Fantastic.
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